A day filled with words

english into french
is his trade as well as mine
translator’s work notes

It had been a very long time since I had read more than 200 pages in a single day. Or a single page in a day, for that matter.

I had first seen Nicolas Richard on our favourite literary programme, La Grande Librairie ("The Great Bookshop") sometime mid-November (Art Spiegelmann, Dany Laferrière and Ryoko Sekiguchi were also guests that night!). Julie got me his book for Christmas. I had started it right away but was still not in a state that allowed me to read for long.

I started it again this Saturday and read more than half. It's a wonderful translation memoir, in which the author presents the various authors he has translated (British, Irish, North American), lists the difficulties he has had to overcome and presents the solutions and revisions he found. A wonderful way for me to try and practice literary translation, many interesting and sometimes funny anecdotes related to his contacts with the authors to ask them questions when his personal research yields no satisfactory results.